New wearable system ‘can aid navigation for visually impaired users’

Researchers have developed an innovative automatic navigation system that can help people with visual impairments to navigate their environment more safely.

Created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the system incorporates a 3D camera, a belt with separately controllable vibrational motors distributed around it, and an electronically reconfigurable Braille interface.

Using a special algorithm, the system is able to quickly identify surfaces and their orientations from the 3D camera data, before causing the appropriate directional motor to buzz to indicate the position of objects.

Meanwhile, the Braille interface displays symbols that describe the objects in the user's environment, with the symbol's position indicating the direction and distance of the item in question.

Robert Katzschmann, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at MIT, said: "We did a couple of different tests with blind users. Having something that didn't infringe on their other senses was important."

The tests showed that the system reduced users' contact with objects other than the chairs they were looking for by 80 percent, while reducing the number of cane collisions with people in a hallway by 86 percent.

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